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Tropical Cyclone Freddy Update -- Now the GOAT for ACE [1]

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Date: 2023-03-12

The Washington Post has an update on Tropical Cyclone Freddy, which just smashed into Mozambique for the second time this weekend — this time as the equivalent of a Cat 2 hurricane after an utterly unprecedented seventh period of rapid strengthening during its equally unprecedented 5-week course across the South Indian Ocean.

In addition to the new records it had already established for both longevity and most periods of rapid strengthening, Freddy has now become the GOAT of all tropical storms in terms of ACE (accumulated cyclone energy, a measurement of wind speed, duration, and total precipitation) — surpassing the previous record holder Ioke’s 85.3 ACE units set in 2006 (mistakenly attributed to 2003 in my previous diary on Freddy). The real gob smacking money quote from the WP article:

That’s more ACE than 100 of the past 172 Atlantic hurricane seasons — not individual storms, but entire seasons’ worth of ACE.

Fortunately, the one record Freddy has come nowhere near to touching is in terms of human deaths, since only a couple of dozen deaths in Madagascar and Mozambique have been reported thus far (along with the crew of a Taiwanese fishing boat apparently caught in its path earlier), though hundreds of thousands in both countries have been adversely affected by all the flooding.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/12/2157704/-Tropical-Cyclone-Freddy-Update-Now-the-GOAT-for-ACE

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